Star Wars Zero Company
Aug 27, 2026·Bit Reactor
About this game
There's a very specific itch that the tactics genre scratches that nothing else quite reaches. That feeling when a plan comes together perfectly - when your sniper covers the flank, your medic pulls a teammate from the brink, and your squad survives a mission that looked completely lost thirty seconds ago. XCOM understood that feeling better than almost anything, and it's been a while since something really captured it. Star Wars Zero Company, launching August 27, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, looks like it might be the game that does. Developed by Bit Reactor - a studio staffed by veterans who worked on the XCOM series - in collaboration with Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games, and published by EA, the game was first revealed at Star Wars Celebration Japan in April 2025, then got its full gameplay trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026. The connection to the people who built modern XCOM is not incidental - it's the entire DNA of the project, and the footage makes that lineage unmistakably clear. The story is set in the twilight of the Clone Wars, approximately one year before the formation of the Galactic Empire. You play as Hawks, a fully customisable former Republic officer - species, gender, appearance, and combat class are all player-defined - who commands Zero Company, a squad of unconventional mercenaries described brilliantly in the trailer as an outfit that works with "ex-Separatists, ex-nobles, ex-cons." The central threat is a Separatist-aligned cult called Kundri Fathom, whose reach poses a galaxy-level danger, and the game draws its tone from a deliberately eclectic set of Star Wars references - the gritty political texture of Andor and Rogue One combined with the varied character arcs of The Clone Wars animated series and the wit of the original trilogy. That's a surprisingly coherent creative brief, and what's been shown suggests Bit Reactor has taken it seriously. The authored squad members are where the game seems to earn its BioWare-adjacent ambitions. A disillusioned clone trooper voiced by Dee Bradley Baker - who spent years voicing clone soldiers in The Clone Wars animated series - a Mandalorian from the ancient Clan Verminoth, and a Tognath Jedi Padawan are among the confirmed named allies. Each has their own story threads, unique abilities, and their own relationship with Hawks that develops across the campaign. Between missions, you manage these relationships at The Den - your base of operations - through conversations, base interactions, and Pillars of Eternity-style text decision events that affect both character arcs and squad dynamics. Then there's the detail that stops everything: permadeath operates at the full squad level. Every character who falls in the field is gone permanently. Not injured. Not benched for a mission. Dead, with a memorial at the Den. Authored companions included. That's a significant creative statement for a Star Wars game, which typically protects its named characters as carefully as possible. Here, the game is explicitly building emotional investment in people who might not survive, and the bond system amplifies this further - characters who fight alongside each other repeatedly develop synergy bonuses, making established pairs more potent and their potential loss more genuinely costly. I can already tell I'm going to become irrationally attached to someone and watch them die in a mission I slightly mismanaged. Off the battlefield, there's a galaxy map, facility upgrades, an intelligence network where you deploy informants to gather pre-mission information, and full customisation of Operators across eight species - Twi'lek, Togruta, Zabrak, Human, Devaronian, Neimoidian, Ovissian, and Weequay. The breadth of the roster and the implied variety of approaches to each mission suggest this is a genuinely deep tactics experience rather than a licensed coat of paint on something shallow. And then the trailer ends with Anakin Skywalker walking through a door, red-bladed lightsaber teased in the background. The internet very reasonably lost its mind. What that means for the story is entirely unclear, but it's a shot that landed. I've been waiting for a tactics game that felt this purposeful since XCOM 2. The Clone Wars setting, the squad dynamics, the permadeath stakes, the team behind it - everything about Star Wars Zero Company is pointing in the right direction. August 27 feels close enough to be exciting.
